The US preference for cars cuts DEEP, it’s at a cellular level.

To share an anecdote, I went to order a sandwich at a fast food restaurant from the counter. After ordering I waited in the restaurant, watching the kitchen staff serve several cars in the drive through. After 10 minutes I just got frustrated, went back to the counter and asked for a refund. I got it and left.

Later I talked to friends about the experience. Apparently restaurants collect metrics for drive through wait times, but not for orders at the counter. So of course managers have a preference to serve drive through customers. The restaurant I went to made no attempt to hide that preference.

I feel like you need a car in the US to be treated normally.

Opposing anecdata: the not-so-secret secret to beating the lines at In-N-Out is to park and order inside or at the window. That's just because the drive thru lines there are always insane.

In-n-out intentionally doesn't prioritize; the only thing that can get you "delayed" out of the order the order was received is if you have something special like cheese fries or a shake that can take extra processing.

During that period last year when the vaccine started to be widely available but still a little tricky to schedule the city shut down my nearest free testing location. The next nearest was "in-car" and wouldn't test me on foot or bike, citing liability. The next next nearest was a 40 minute bus ride away, obviously a very reasonable choice when you suspect you have covid.

I feel like this potentially illustrates several american social pathologies but probably best to stick to the car one for now.

Burger King Manager confirmed the same to myself.

Imo it should become regulation that all cars have to have some audio transparency tech like headphones have. Then we would be able to lower the volume of emergency sirens which are obscenely loud to penetrate cars.

Massively reducing car usage is a much better solution with much more wide-spread benefits.

That as well. But it does feel very wrong that combustion engine users can emit huge amounts of noise and pollution while sitting in sound proof, HEPA filtered boxes.

The horn on automobiles should be mounted inside the cabin. They can make it as loud as they need to make it, but the person who hears it the loudest should be the driver.

I've often thought this should apply to motorcycles too. Motorcycle helmets would have speakers installed inside, wirelessly connected to the bike so that it produces realistic motorcycle sound effects when you operate the throttle.

This way, motorcycle enthusiasts could have all of their "loud pipe" thrills while riding a clean, silent electric motorcycle and not disturbing their neighbors!

For even more realism, vibrators could be installed in the seat to mimic a combustion engine's "vroom".

You joke, but they do this in cars.

https://motorandwheels.com/cars-with-active-sound-design/

These kinds of all-or-nothing approaches are not feasible - even in high-walkability scoring cities. Just look beyond your city's micro-core and see how reliant people are on cars - I'm talking places as diverse Oslo, Norway, Rome, Italy or Amsterdam, NL ( the HN bicyclist collective's favorite city ) [1]

People rely on cars for very valid, strong & un-substitute-able reasons in 1000s of cities on this planet ( even without counting the countries in the developing world which are just now getting a taste of vehicular freedom ). HN represents a tiny slice of of an already small slice of wishful thinkers whose pipe dreams get a dose of reality the moment you step outside your NIMBY bubble.

Even reduced car usage - in what is touted as the most bike-friendly city on earth at least here on HN - looks like this in the Baarsjes and Oud West neighborhoods of Amsterdam.

Een rondje door de Baarsjes en Oud West.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN7ox6bxBlI

this would also help stop people hooting unnecessarily, if they had to hear it themselves

And this is one of the major reasons I’m hopeful for electric cars.

People will still be hobbyists with loud cars and motorcycles, though (at least in the US). We literally just need to legislate a package of laws that says people can't make loud noise with their vehicle, repeated offenses result in the vehicle being taken away, and anyone that modifies vehicles to make loud noise will be fined heavily.

I’m all for it it but unfortunately our local law enforcement in the bay couldn’t care less about enforcing existing noise violations for modded cars and motorcycles. So we can fill the books with laws but if they aren’t enforced it’s as if they don’t exist.